Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Monday, October 28, 2013

I love carousels. I will never be too old to want to ride one. As the years go by, I might have to choose to sit on a little painted bench that goes round and round while the horses go up and down but still I will choose to ride. I love the lights and the painted horses. I love the music and I especially love to see little children faces light up when they spot their mom and dad as they round a corner. Everyone is so gleeful and seemingly surprised time and time again. Riders and spectators wave to each other with great abandon. Riders disappear as the carousel makes another circle, and then the crowd roars and waves upon recognition, "there he is", a name is called, a little childs face lights up, smiles abound. Generation after generation the joy never dies.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Friday, October 25, 2013

Photograph Ronis, Lovers Bastille"She May be the face I can't forget A trace of pleasure or regret May be my treasure or the price I have to pay She may be the song that summer sings May be the chill that autumn brings May be a hundred different things Within the measure of a day." - From the translated french song Tous les visages de l'amorby Charles Aznavour and Herbert Kretzmer)

Thursday, October 24, 2013

"May you, every day, connect with the brilliancy of your own spirit. And may you always remember that obstacles in the path are not obstacles, they ARE the path." - Seattle-based author and editor Jane Catherine Lotter

Saturday, October 19, 2013

"To experience peace does not mean that your life is always blissful. It means that you are capable of tapping into a blissful state of mind amidst the normal chaos of a blissful life." -Jill Boelte Taylor

Thursday, October 17, 2013

"I write in my journal everyday.""Why's that?""So much happens in life, I think it's good to live it again and get some distance from it. Or else everything is in a muddle,like on a merry-go-round." - From Humans in New York

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Friday, October 11, 2013

Thank you to Scott Huddleston of the San Antonio Express news for this wonderful article on the discovery of one our grandfather Kimi Eizo Jingu's handpainted photographs. An amazing discovery and a significant treasure uncovered.

Old Photo connects families, history

Vivian Garoni, who owns the photograph of the Japanese Tea Garden that was colorized by Kimi Eizo Jingu, points out details in the picture to Peggy Nishio, the artist's granddaughter.

An old
hand-painted photo of the Japanese Tea Garden that for decades was stored, for
in a garage and forgotten has united two families with deep San Antonio roots.

The
circa-1920s photo by San Antonio native Eugene Goldbeck, known for panoramic
images of local scenes and sites worldwide, also is a rare surviving work by
Japanese artist Kimi Eizo Jingu, who ran the garden, a popular visitor site,
from its 1918 opening until he died in 1938.

Jingu lived
in a stone house in the garden with his wife and eight children.

The piece
is the only work by Jingu that descendants ever have seen.

“It was the
first time we'd actually seen his signature. It opened up a whole new world for
us,” said Peggy Nishio, Jingu's granddaughter.

Jingu lived
in a stone house in the garden with his wife and eight children.

The piece
is the only work by Jingu that descendants ever have seen.

“It was the
first time we'd actually seen his signature. It opened up a whole new world for
us,” said Peggy Nishio, Jingu's granddaughter.

To San
Antonio's Garoni family, which owns the rare item, being able to show it to one
of the Jingu descendants has had its own rewards.

“My dad
would have loved this,” said John Garoni, whose father, John Charles Garoni,
had treasured the photo before he died in 2010.

Family
members gathered around a dining table where the photo, still in its original,
specially treated bamboo frame Jingu is thought to have made himself, has been
since they showed it to Nishio a few weeks ago.

Tom
Shelton, photo curator with the University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries
Special Collections, said the work is unique, reflecting the genius of both
Goldbeck and Jingu, who highlighted it in light brown, green and crimson.

“The
Japanese used restraint in adding color to black and white images,” Shelton
said. “Some would want to remove the photo from the frame and display it
separately. I would say all of this needs to stay together.”

About a month ago, Garoni read a
San Antonio Express-News article about paintings by Nancy Enkoji, Nishio's
sister, now on display at the garden, that replicate scenes of the four seasons
that Jingu had painted around the 1920s.

Enkoji relied on memories of her
mother, Mabel Enkoji, who died in July, in creating the panels, but never had
seen any of Jingu's surviving artwork. So the Garonis contacted the Jingu
descendants, who now live mostly in California, and invited them to see the
work.

Vivian Garoni, 92, the widow of
John Charles, said the photo, dated 1924 and signed “K.E. Jingu,” was given by
Jingu to city Parks Commissioner Ray Lambert, whose visions led to development
of the garden and surrounding Brackenridge Park.

After Lambert died in 1927, the
photo belonged to his widow, Helena Garoni, and stayed in the family, she said.
It sat in the rafters of a relative's garage for decades, suffering minor water
damage until Vivian and John Charles Garoni took possession of it in the 1960s.

The photo hung over a fireplace at
their home at Medina Lake until they sold the house in 1991.

shuddleston@express-news.net

San Antonio Express-News

This photograph was colorized by San Antonio Japanese immigrant Kimi Eizo Jingu in the 1920s. Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013

Thursday, October 10, 2013

The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.)

By OLIVER SACKS

Published: July 6, 2013

LAST night I dreamed about mercury — huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At 11, I could say “I am sodium” (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold. A few years ago, when I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his 80th birthday — a special bottle that could neither leak nor break — he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.”

Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over. My mother was the 16th of 18 children; I was the youngest of her four sons, and almost the youngest of the vast cousinhood on her side of the family. I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.

I thought I would die at 41, when I had a bad fall and broke a leg while mountaineering alone. I splinted the leg as best I could and started to lever myself down the mountain, clumsily, with my arms. In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude — gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude, too, that I had been able to give something back. “Awakenings” had been published the previous year.

At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”) I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.”

I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever “completing a life” means. Some of my patients in their 90s or 100s say nunc dimittis — “I have had a full life, and now I am ready to go.” For some of them, this means going to heaven — it is always heaven rather than hell, though Samuel Johnson and James Boswell both quaked at the thought of going to hell and got furious with David Hume, who entertained no such beliefs. I have no belief in (or desire for) any post-mortem existence, other than in the memories of friends and the hope that some of my books may still “speak” to people after my death.

W. H. Auden often told me he thought he would live to 80 and then “bugger off” (he lived only to 67). Though it is 40 years since his death, I often dream of him, and of my parents and of former patients — all long gone but loved and important in my life.

At 80, the specter of dementia or stroke looms. A third of one’s contemporaries are dead, and many more, with profound mental or physical damage, are trapped in a tragic and minimal existence. At 80 the marks of decay are all too visible. One’s reactions are a little slower, names more frequently elude one, and one’s energies must be husbanded, but even so, one may often feel full of energy and life and not at all “old.” Perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life.

When my time comes, I hope I can die in harness, as Francis Crick did. When he was told that his colon cancer had returned, at first he said nothing; he simply looked into the distance for a minute and then resumed his previous train of thought. When pressed about his diagnosis a few weeks later, he said, “Whatever has a beginning must have an ending.” When he died, at 88, he was still fully engaged in his most creative work.

My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

""POP," as it was soon nicknamed and pronounced, "pee-oh-pee" was a joint venture between CBS and Santa Anita Park. It opened on Saturday, July 28, 1958 with an attendance of 20,000. The next day, the park drew 37,262 which outperformed Disneyland's attendance figure that day. Admission was ninety cents for adults which included access to the park and certain exhibits. The term "POP" was also used as a clever acronym for "Pay One Price", though other rides and attractions were on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Like Disneyland, Pacific Ocean Park found corporate sponsors to share the expense of some exhibits. Six of the pier's original attractions were incorporated into the new park: The Sea Serpent roller coaster, the antique Looff carousel, the Toonerville Fun House, the Glass House, twin diving bells and more." -Wikipedia

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

"Everything you need to fulfill your destiny was with you at the moment before, during, and after your conception–so retreat to that knowledge now. Trust in the infinite wisdom that created you." -Dr. Wayne Dyer

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Saturday, October 5, 2013

"But I was a lucky woman, who led a lucky existence, and for this I am grateful."- Self written obituary by Seattle-based author and editor Jane Catherine Lotter

I am a lucky woman for so many reasons. I do not take that for granted. I am fortunate to have a good marriage to a good man and to be blessed with two amazing daughters. I have had the privilege of watching them grow up. That was my greatest gift to be their mother. I am ever grateful not only for them but for being born into a large and loving family with the best sister and brother one could ever hope for, tons of cousins, aunts and uncles and a mother and father that gave me the most memorable and wonderful childhood which filled my heart with love. These are riches beyond compare. I thank God for these true blessings.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Thanks to all of you who have sent me your supportive thoughts, well wishes and prayers. I go into surgery this morning (around 9:30 P.S.T.) feeling confident and completely surrounded by light and love.

"Keep your sunny side up,up Hide the side that gets blue When their team is knocking you flat, smile and say'we're better than that" You got to keep your sunny side up, up Let your laughter shine through ,do stand upon your legs Be like two fried eggs keep your sunny side up."

About Me

I believe in love and kindness, family first, deep meaningful friendships, counting one's blessings and giving to others what you yourself need. I strive to see life as a glass half full. I am very grateful for the life I have and all the wonderful people that make this grand adventure so worthwhile.